If it wasn’t any of those circumstances, it was my parents’ innate, unshakable conviction that I was more valuable at home where they could manage me.
And if it wasn’t my parents, at the end of the day, it was my own failings. My own inability to get cast or find my way into this community as myself. My inability even to hold on to somebody. I didn’t belong at Kensington, and trying to belong made it worse every time.
“Jordan,” Reese repeated, but I stood up.
“I need to go,” I said. “Thank you for talking. But this isn’t going to work.”
She called after me one more time as I walked out the door.
Usually, Thanksgiving Break made the last couple weeks of school before Winter Break feel unnecessary. This year was different. With two weeks to go, the campus started to buzz with competition talk. Advertisements plastered campus. An Aural Fixation poster the size of my mattress appeared in McKnight above the dish return. A cappella talk started to infiltrate the neurotic pre-exam discussions of study techniques: Are you going to ask for their beatboxer’s signature? He’s so cute. Do you think people are going to stake out seats ahead of time? Carnelian has to win. No, the Sharps. No, Hear Hear. Do you think Aural Fixation is going to sing? If they do “When You Call,” I think I’m going to pass out . . .
Soon, the obligatory counterculture discussions about the competition sprang up: Why is this happening with exams coming up? We need to study. Who cares about a cappella, anyway? It’s not even real music. Nobody was this excited when that amazing slam poet toured here. We didn’t get posters when that award-winning experimental kazoo artist did a show here . . . he got featured in TIME and everything . . . but nooo, a cappella is more important . . .
Trav moved rehearsals to the Arlington stage so we could practice with sound tech. We trained ourselves to avoid the deafening feedback that came from aiming Ps and Bs directly at our handheld mics, shots of air that sounded like pressure popping in the amplifiers.
Trav had a pair of kids from the music school sitting backstage left, plugged into a digital soundboard, tweaking dials so that the rocket-launch decibel levels from Isaac and Erik didn’t drown out Nihal and Marcus, who sounded like mosquitoes in comparison. These kids didn’t seem to have names and didn’t talk to anyone but Trav, but they seemed to love telling him things he already knew. They also wore Official Sound Guy Face, which was an intriguing blend of displeased and pompous.
To be fair to the tech guys, it must have been infuriating to watch us mess up in the same ways repeatedly for nights on end. “Hold the mic farther from your face,” Trav told Erik one night, for the eightieth time.
Erik looked like he wanted to throw the mic at the wall. “Can’t we just use the area mics, like every other group?”
“No,” Trav snapped, and took a breath. “No. This is worth it. Otherwise, we’ll lose half the arrangement to the choreography, and we’ll be hideously quiet in comparison to everyone else, and—just trust me.”
He was right, as always. When we were balanced and mixed and polished, the mics were worth every minute we’d spent on them. The curved black spine of the performance hall reflected sound down to the back walls, every consonant as crisp as a cracked knuckle. The Nest had its own resonance, a homey echo back from the rafters, but here, plugged in, amplified, and choreographed, we sounded like another group entirely.
After rehearsals, we packed up our equipment and marched it up the Prince stairs. We had eight wireless mics, heavy black Sennheisers; the eight-channel receiver; the mixer, with its army of sliders and dials and plugs; and a couple of bulky monitors that made my arms ache.
“Why don’t the other groups use individual mics?” I asked once, as we climbed up to the Nest, equipment in hand.
“Because they have more people,” Nihal replied over his shoulder. “And mics get expensive very fast.”
“Careful, rooks,” Trav barked as Erik and Marcus accidentally knocked the tech trunk into the wall. They panted apologies. The instant we were back inside the Nest, Trav was under the lid of the chest and inspecting every bit and every piece, ensuring that nothing was scraped or bent. He had a tender, soulful look on his face, as if his father had wrought the sound tech over the course of sixty-one long years and it was all Trav had left of him.
I set down a monitor with a grunt. “How expensive?” I asked.
“$11,000, I think?” Nihal said, glancing to Mama for confirmation.
I choked on my breath. “What?”
“Yeah, several years’ concert tickets. Dr. Graves helped us figure everything out—he handles the money.” Nihal raised his eyebrows, his eyes laughing. “We suspect he’s skimmed off the top.”
I was still gaping. “What, are those mics made out of platinum?”
“Sapphire, actually.”
I couldn’t even quip back. I could hardly think about money these days. It was a short slide to an inevitable reminder: Kiss this place goodbye.
As the competition clock ticked down from two weeks to ten days to seven, I drifted out from myself like a boat leaving land. I began to count my lasts: the last essay I would turn in to Rollins, the last critique Reese would give on my monologue, the last time I would see Carnelian walking around campus in early December, doing jazz arrangements of carols. During the Greek Monologue showcase: last time I would see Ash perform, then Pilar, then Jamie. Ticking down by the word.
My finals counted down. Core classes had exams first, hour-long blocks of frantic scribbling in blue books; electives took over on Wednesday; and the week ended with a whimper, not a bang, empty class periods filled with distractions. On Friday, I walked out of my last class, English with Mr. O’Neill; we’d read a poem by Eavan Boland he’d said was his favorite, about an Irish couple killed by weather and hunger and history. Emerging into the winter light, I got that feeling that sometimes sets in after waking up from a particularly vivid dream, a disconnection from reality. I almost expected the landscape to disappear around me patch by patch.
Late that afternoon, Isaac and I got a text from Jon Cox: a picture of his and Mama’s dorm-room door. I zoomed in on the image.
A whiteboard hung on the door. I’d swung by their room in Ewing a couple times and seen it—usually, inside jokes were scribbled across the board, doodles of comic book characters, thinly veiled sexual references, or the running count of how many times Mama had reminded Jon to take out the trash (thirty-four).
In Jon Cox’s text, the whiteboard wore a very different doodle. A drawing of a person filled most of the space, a bulging shape whose head, hands, and feet were exaggeratedly small, toothpaste caps on a bursting tube. The doodle wore a shirt that read in angry capitals, THEODORE PUGH HUGE.